Interoperability 2.0: MS Office to support ODF and PDF

Welcome to real world interoperability that works - Interoperability 2.0. and we have an unlikely harbinger of this effort - Microsoft Corporation.

globalization Microsoft has announced that from Office 2007 SP2, it will start supporting other document formats including Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. This means that customers now don’t have to worry about what format they receive their documents in, they can work on it using Office 2007 SP2. The default format for MS Office remains to be OpenXML, a recently approved open ISO standard. However, a user will be able to change the default to ODF..

MS Office 2007 SP2 will have ability to open, edit and save documents in the Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF) as well.

This makes MS Office 2007 suite the “uber productivity suite”..

The sceptics would already be wondering - “MS is at it again. milking the standard for its commercial interest again”.. the news for them is that Microsoft has committed to supporting the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees of these standards i.e. OASIS . Here’s my missive to them – make Open Office support OpenXML. this is what will help the customers realise true benefits of interoperability. Open your minds and deeds and let Interoperability 2.0 settle in.. it should be about the customer and choice, shouldn't it be?

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